Panel Discussion
AbilityNet - Accessibility 2.0 Conference
Robin
We are now going to hand over to the panel, chaired by Julie Howell. I’m sure everybody knows Julie. Julie’s the Director of Accessibility for the digital design agency Fortune Cookie. Prior to that she was Digital Policy Development Manager for the RNIB, Technical Author of PAS 78. She was .. she got the Greatest Individual To Contribution To New Media Awards 2005/6, a special Lifetime Achievement Award 2007.
So I’m going to hand you over to the extremely capable hands of Julie who’s going to introduce the panellists that we’ve got and she might also want to mention in passing about the awards that they’ve nabbed at the Travolution Awards ceremony last night. So I’ll pass you over to Julie. Thanks.
Julie
Thanks very much. Thanks very much Robin. I’m so delighted to be here and so pleased so many of you have stayed so late on a Friday, that’s fantastic. As Robin mentioned I’m feeling a bit fragile. It’s been a bit full on this week. There’s been another accessibility conference and I spoke at that as some of you may know. And we had huge success with Fortune Cookie last night at the Travolution Awards, the travel sector, being one that we’re attempting to make accessible and we had some wins there last night. So I got to bed at three last night, the night before and the night before so I’m feeling a bit lively. So apologies for that.
This is going to be a very interactive session and I am going to introduce the panel shortly, but Kath Moonan said I could say whatever I wanted so I’m going to do that. So where are we now? It’s great to hear all of this debate today and new ideas all around web 2.0 but aren’t we back exactly where we’ve been so many times over the past decade with accessibility?
I’ve been very, very fortunate because I’m now so old I’ve seen so much happen in the past 10 -12 years with accessibility, and here we are again at the new brave frontier of technical design and disabled people are missing out again. Or are we? And is it always everybody else’s fault, or is it actually our fault, a bit, for not doing enough to make our voices heard?
I think we’ve got a real opportunity with web 2.0 because albeit we seem to be again facing the opposite direction to everybody else, I think that may put us an advantage. What I mean is when disabled people get on the web for the first time, what we often go and look for is information about our condition and try and find people like us. I have Multiple Sclerosis and I’ve run an online community for people like me for the past 13 years and it was very much born out of that need, or that realisation that the web could be a fantastic way for me to be empowered by talking to other people with MS. So that’s the vertical approach to social networking.
For everybody else it seems to have happened the other way round. It’s all been very mainstream, so things like Facebook and Bebo and all of these social networks are about connecting with just anybody in a very general kind of way of building up networks of friends. But now you’ll hear people talking about well it’s going to get more vertical in the next few years and it’s going to be around niche interests. Well isn’t that the thing that we’re great experts in because we’ve been doing this for the past 10, 12, 13 years?
So it’s a real opportunity for those of us who know about proper social networking, getting people together around shared interest and commonalities to say actually we’ve got huge expertise in this area, why don’t you come and talk to us.
I should also mention that you probably know a few years ago we produced a document, a specification, called PAS 78 which was to bring a lot of accessibility and usability by disabled people guidance under one document. I hope you’re already aware, but if you’re not here’s the news that PAS 78 is about to be turned in to a full British standard and it’ll be the first full British standard for web accessibility.
I’m the chair of the BSI Committee that’s going to be producing that and it’s going to be highly consultative and everybody in this room and everybody you know can get involved in helping us write that. There’s going to be a consultation phase on the draft round about September and so do please drop me a line, AbilityNet will tell you how to get hold of me. If you’re interested in shaping the accessible future of the web this is very much your opportunity.
Now I as you know I’m a disability rights campaigner and so I’m interested in talking to people in power and to encouraging other people to go and pester people who are in power. And when I say people in power that kind of changes. Just let me say up front, it’s not the Government. There’s no power there when it comes to disabled people accessing the web. At the moment the power is definitely with the people behind the various social networks and that’s why today is absolutely crucial.
Further to that, as some of you know, I moved from RNIB to working in a web design agency and I now know that the power is in the marketing departments of all our clients. They’re the ones who are still saying, “Oh disabled people are not part of our audience and what we’re doing is for young people.” We need to influence those people. We need to make sure that marketing are banging the drum for accessibility as well.
And something I heard earlier in one of the other presentations was about the increasing importance of content editors as well. The technical stuff really is licked. We’ve done that, we have the technology. But people who are writing content for the web, from people who just write alt text to people who write all sorts of content and we’ve heard about learning disability today. They’re the people who can make the web so much more usable for disabled people.
A slight shift in paradigm as well and this was something that Jonathan brought up in his talk. Accessibility is old school. Accessibility for me is about the ability of technology to access the content of your website and it’s about interoperability between technologies, including assistive technologies, and the content on the web.
Usability by disabled people is old school. The ability of a disabled person to have access to the same service at the same time, at the same cost as somebody who doesn’t have a disability. Where we are now and the language that we’re deploying when we’re talking about this new standard is rich user experience for disabled people, and the stuff that Jonathan described with the BBC and BBC Jam is absolutely what that’s all about.
Why should you have a very boring experience of the web because you have a disability? Why can’t you be engaged as much as somebody who doesn’t have a disability? I’ve never understood the difference between my use of the web and somebody who’s blind. Why can’t we all be engaged with the same degree of richness? And involvement of disabled people seems absolutely key to that.
What I’d like to do is put some questions to each of our panel members to get us going. We are going to throw it open to the floor, but just to get you thinking about the kind of things that you would like to say. I’d just like to quickly just introduce you to everybody who’s here on the panel who I’ve the pleasure of knowing pretty much without looking at notes.
So we have Mike Davies from Yahoo. Kath Moonan from AbilityNet. Bim Egan from RNIB. Jonathan Hassell from the BBC. Antonia Hyde from United Response, and Panayiotis Zaphiris, is that right? Panayiotis, I’m terrible … close, from the City University and we’ll be hearing from all of them and they’ll be answering your questions.
But I’d like to start off by putting questions to each of the panel in turn. And this isn’t like a fake thing I’ve asked them before because I only just wrote these questions when the last speaker was talking. So it’s exciting for all of us.
I’d like to start with … Bim. Bim, I’d like to start with you, the least prepared with your cup to your mouth. So sorry about that. But Bim there’s been a lot in the press recently about accessibility going backwards lately and the accessibility of the web getting worse, and I’m thinking particularly not of web 2.0 specifically, but there was report - Better Connected - which looked at the accessibility of local government websites and the claim there was that things are getting worse, they’re not getting better which sounds hugely depressing and disappointing. You’re a screen reader user yourself as well as giving advice through RNIB. Bim is it getting better or is it getting worse? What’s the true picture?
Bim
It’s getting better.
Julie
It’s getting better?
Bim
It’s most definitely getting better. I think one of the problems that we have when we’re assessing websites, or when we’re talking about whether or not a site is accessible is we’re comparing it with its peers today. So as websites have gradually become more accessible those that haven’t quite caught up got all of their headings in the right order, got all of the old fashioned attributes either there or not, or silent where they should be silent. They’re getting hammered because they’re doing it wrong.
But if we go back five years there were no headings on any web pages. Screen readers wouldn’t know what to do with them if there had been. We’re getting to a situation now where the technology’s moved on, the designers have moved on, everybody’s moved up. We’re geared up to a much higher level of accessibility and we’re beating ourselves up about being less accessible and in fact we’re probably 200% more accessible than we were six years ago.
Julie
Yes, and that message seems to be getting lost and it seems like something that we have to keep reiterating. Something that I find Bim is that people out there, these marketing people, these owners of businesses, seem to think that accessibility is something that’s fixed and don’t seem to appreciate that as technology matures it’s kind of a moveable feast. And almost seem critical of us when we say well here’s some newer guidance. “Oh so the guidance you gave us was wrong then.” No, but we’re moving forward all the time. Would you say, do you come across that?
Bim
Yes and another thing that we come across all of the time is as – and this is ever so slightly critical – as developers become more skilled they become more evangelistic. They become more dedicated, they become square wheel builders. They decide, “Oh yes I know what I can do. I can …” because their understanding isn’t complete about the user experience they think well I’ll do this, I’ll put all of the access keys in a nice little list and hide them off screen, and then they’re nice and handy for all the screen reader users, and it’ll save me actually having to link access keys to any of my live links, visible links.
And what that means in effect is that there are for somebody who’s not a screen reader user up to 12 completely invisible links, somebody who’s tabbing just can’t see where the web page is going to become live. They think the whole website’s broken. For somebody who is a screen reader there’s no benefit. There is no benefit to a screen reader user by having all of those links in a great long list at the beginning because you have to get through them.
So there are no winners and there are losers and that’s the wrong way to look at accessibility. So that’s where we …
Julie
I’m struck very much …yes, thank you.
Bim
… that’s where we have tended to tip over and do a bit of … square wheel inventing which is a little unfortunate.
Julie
Yes and I’m struck very much as well that we have early entrance to this and we’re moving people forward, but also we need to make sure that we’ve got the press on our side too. I get very sick of reading depressing press reports about so and so’s website is terrible, River Island’s always being had a go at. They’re by no means the worst or the only in their sector. And the concentration on that and it’s almost like the press just want to write about it when it’s bad and not about it when it’s good. And perhaps that’s something where we can all intervene is in taking out some of those good stories.
Mike if I can turn to you. So why is Yahoo here? Facebook’s not here, Bebo’s not here, Yahoo is here which is fantastic. What are you doing that’s different?
Mike
I think we’re talking to people who actually matter, who actually use our services. Now I’ve been … I think a lot of why I’m here is to do with the work Legal and General put in a couple of years ago and actually turned around online business to such an extent it just lit up how profitable accessibility can be. And it’s not just about pulling so much money out of disabled people as possible. It actually does directly improve the website for anybody who wants to use it. And it makes it … the improvement is such that people are willing to stay longer and actually complete transactions. So there’s a massive business benefit, but not many people are listening to it.
Julie
How come the board at Yahoo then and the senior management at Yahoo have got this? When was the penny dropped? Why did they recruit you? When did that … I’m guessing the penny dropped before you were there, so you may not know? But what’s the … how did they become enlightened?
Mike
I think the reason why shows where we’re falling short in accessibility terms. The reason why I’m at Yahoo is because of one guy alone and that was Murray Rowan. Now he built probably the best web team you’ll ever see in Europe. You’ll never see a team of that calibre again. Now he has got a long history of accessibility research, so he’s got a natural understanding, he immediately knows what needs to be done. And of course once Murray knows what needs to be done he gets down and gets it done.
So that’s what’s improved Yahoo over the last 18 months, particularly from the time I’ve been there is we’re deadly serious about doing this as well as we can in Europe. It’s just getting the rest of the organisation on the same page as well. That’s a battle which we are fighting at the moment and we are hoping to do as well as we can on that battle.
Julie
It’s very interesting that you’ve … it’s a battle though but it’s from top down. Quite often it’s evangelists trying to go from the bottom up with this. It’s very interesting to have things the other way.
Mike
I think what you’ll find is out of all the success stories you’ll about accessibility the real meaty success stories is taking an individual of some power to actually turn around and say we’re doing the wrong thing. Legal and General is another great example. That was down to one person, and that was Dave Wilton who was the web team manager at the time. He saw the need for it and he pushed for it and that’s why it is the business case when it comes to the business benefits of web accessibility. It requires one person with the determination and with the clout to actually do something.
Julie
And perhaps a role for the rest of us to get to those people, make them exposed to those messages and get that influencing going.
Are we all right here.
Audience
You’re not loud enough.
Julie
Not loud enough. I’m sure I’m loud enough.
Antonia can I come to you next. And it was wonderful to hear your presentation. A few years ago when we were writing the specification PAS 78, we knew we weren’t covering all the bases for people with learning disabilities so it was really, really great to hear you talking about that. There was lots of information and I made lots of notes.
How can we best, all of us who are responsible for website design, we know we need to involve people with learning disabilities more? How can we do that? Where do we start? I wouldn’t know where to start?
Antonia
Well I think the problem is that traditionally people with learning disabilities really haven’t had a voice and I think there is an argument at the moment that disabled users should be lobbying to be included and to be considered in the development of websites. The problem that people with learning disabilities generally are facing is that they haven’t really had a voice, they don’t know how to make their voice heard. So I think it’s collaboration, it’s about talking to a lot of good people who are doing a lot of good work and getting to end users. Ability Net are involving people with learning disabilities in the testing that they do. So I think it’s just about trying to get everyone together so that we can all collaborate.
Julie
Jonathan said something that was really, really interesting and it was good to hear you both talking. And something that I haven’t heard before or thought about was that people with learning disabilities might be put off or intimidated from participating in mainstream user generated content for fear of being pulled up on getting things wrong or making mistakes.
And so what do we do Jonathan to break that cycle for people? Do we just need to keep on at it and it’s all part of the kind of … I often feel I have an ambassadorial role. Is that how we all have to be as disabled people, just keep on doing it and educating through getting stuck in?
Jonathan
Thanks for that. That was the hard one. I don’t know if I’ve got an answer for that. I know what the problem is and to a certain extent the problem is giving people the means to express themselves and giving them a voice which enables them to take all of the places that they have skills and really use those skills. I think the problem is that up until recently and I think probably very pervasively on the web … it’s all been about text.
Really when it comes to down to it, if you’re having a discussion … I’m not showing pictures to give my answer to this … to that, to your question. I’m actually using language to convey my opinion about what we can do and that’s the way the web is. You have big discussions between people, all of which are pretty much text based and also I think there is something which is potentially good but also bad about the web, is that it’s all very anonymous. It’s less anonymous than it used to be. But it does mean that people are not particularly charitable when it comes to wondering whether or not the opinion that they’ve just heard from the person that they’re discussing with …
Julie
Flamers I think they’re called.
Jonathan
Well yeah, well it used to be flame and so if I’m not able to use the communication channels which are made available to me, because actually they work in ways that don’t work for me, then I’m always going to be disabled by the medium of communication there in the same way that if I were deaf - I mean the last time I did a panel like this everybody in the audience was a BSL user. And I felt reasonably disabled in that room because I was having to do everything through an interpreter and at the end one of the other people said to me, actually they were various of your words that I think the interpreter got wrong.
And that’s the experience that people have. It’s actually, it’s hard because when it comes to users discussing with each other and putting up their work it actually comes down to the audience and their ability to appreciate difference. So if you’ve got a voting mechanism and you have somebody with a learning difficulty who’s put a really, really great video on YouTube and people vote on it, but they really don’t come from the same mind set or same understanding, they may not appreciate it at all and therefore it may get a very low vote and may be forgotten.
And so I think this is why it’s so important for us to get more disabled people getting their viewpoint out there because at the moment people aren’t hearing or if they are hearing they’re not appreciating.
Julie
A couple of days ago I was at a presentation by Second Life which is virtual worlds, I’m sure you’ve all heard of it if not used it. And interesting thing there is about disabled people’s use of Second Life and this idea that one of the things the web can do is transcend disability so if you are severely disabled you don’t necessarily have to declare that. You choose an avatar for yourself, it can be an able bodied one or do you want to make it exactly the same? If you are a wheelchair user in real life should you be a wheelchair user on the web? I wonder if you have any thoughts on that. Do our needs become more invisible if we’re set free by the web and we don’t talk about it, how do we raise awareness of disabled people’s …
Jonathan
Yeah.
Julie
… the benefits we can get from the web.
Jonathan
I think escapism has a place and I think - gosh, I can’t remember his first name - but Wilde the group of eight people who are that one character on Second Life, if you read Second Lives it’s a wonderful novel about how people use Second Life and how a collection of people who are one person on Second Life, they’re all confined to a room as far as I can see, but Second Life gives them wings.
So escapism has a place, but I wouldn’t want anybody to lose their appreciation of their identity in that escape. One of the things that I really value about actually the capital D Deaf community, so the BSL community, is that in a lot of ways they don’t regard themselves as disabled. They regard themselves as using a different language. I can hear, they can use BSL. Who’s disabled there? And they have a very strong sense of identity which to a certain extent demands other people to do some of that adaptation as well.
So if you’re communicating you need to find a common language and ideally it’s both people that adapt and also both people are able to bring who they are to that discussion. So I wouldn’t want all disabled people to be on Second Life as, if you like, non disabled people unless that’s what they want. Yeah.
Julie
Yeah, yeah. And I think as well because some of us who are disabled or affected by disability and have used the web for a long time, something that I find with talking to clients who are brand new to accessibility and disabled people use computers and all of that stuff, is explaining these sorts of complexities and this sort of debate is quite tricky, which is why it’s great this is being captured for a podcast because then we can share that kind of complexity.
Kath I wanted to come to you know to talk about the user involvement of disabled people. One of the things that was very, very strong in PAS 78, the specification we produced a couple of years ago, is how absolutely crucial it is to involve disabled people right from the very beginning at the conceptual stage and through the various parts of the design lifecycle. And afterwards as well in getting feedback and AbilityNet is renowned for it, providing excellent, excellent services in that way.
I’d just like you though to just tell us a little bit more about, am I right in saying that it is crucial to … ‘cause I hear some people say no, you … there’s, it’s too expensive, it’s too difficult, it’s … I’d love to hear what you have to say about that.
Kath
Yeah, thanks Julie. First of all can I just say because Yahoo, can I just publicly say on behalf of me and the charity that I work for that I’m really sorry that we had to give you a low mark in the State of the eNation because it was the door on to the fantastic services that caused the problem.
And then I’m going to start off with Christian you showed a picture of Suzy Sue in your presentation and that was beautiful, but it’s still not enough for me not to disagree with you. And what Christian was saying earlier is that he was saying that possibly you needed a lot of users to get any useful results and there’s lots of usability experts in the room so you can all kick my bum afterwards if you think I’m wrong.
At AbilityNet we test with eight users typically and we work with people with a whole range of different impairments, learning disability, dyslexia, people who have difficulties using a mouse, say with like Parkinson’s or a condition like that, keyboard, low vision, screen mag and screen reader users. And sometimes we have more than one user with … and voice recognition software as well. And there’s a few other things, but that’s our basis.
But I’ve been involved in the user testing for two years now and I know that there’s Julia up there who did a lot of the testing as well when she was at AbilityNet, and what we found is that when we’ve got that range of users, you start to see patterns emerge. So what doesn’t work for the screen reader users doesn’t work for the voice recognition software users either. And because out of that group only one of the seven people is interacting with an audio version of the website, we capture absolutely loads of the usability problems to do with the design.
So I’m from more the Steve Krug school of thought about usability testing, and okay I might not get a scientific pass for it but I know for a fact that it passes most of the issues. Also if you start scaling everything up like the number of users all that’s going to happen is less people are going to get involved in involving disabled users. So I think it’s really important to try and keep it inexpensive.
Any usability testing always has a cost to it, but we all know what the return on investment is and also Christian made a fantastic point earlier about if you test with users with disabilities and it works, it’s like the extreme user testing phrase that Helen Petrie came out with in 2004, still holds weight - that if you can make your site work with a screen magnifier and with voice recognition it works. I’ll shut up in a minute but when we get users into the lab no one just talks about their disability or their AT. When you get down to a test with someone, that almost doesn’t become relevant any more because what we’re doing is we’re testing usability. And when people talk about usability when we’re testing, we don’t ignore it, that’s the central part of the report.
So I’d say it’s a fantastic service and it’s wonderful value for money.
Julie
In fact Kath I don’t want you to shut up because I want to ask you something else.
Kath
Okay.
Julie
And that’s about one of the criticisms that’s often put to me and perhaps will be this afternoon again, is that we talk about involving disabled people and user testing, but then clients often find it very hard to get that kind of support. You and I were having a little chat earlier this afternoon you mentioned about the agility and that perhaps we who talk about these and promote these issues and supply these services are a little bit slow …
Kath
Yeah.
Julie
… to provide services that people are then turning to us for.
Kath
Yeah. I think it’s one of the reasons why we did this conference because the accessibility community as it were, you’ve got people like us and RNIB and the W3C, and because of the nature of what we do, how long has it taken to turn WCAG round? And it’s like, we’re living in a world where the web is changing like that [clicks finger] and the standards aren’t keeping up with it and I think that what I’d like to see is accessibility becoming more agile and more responsive because that’s the only way that we’re going to keep up with the massive changes that are happening at the moment.
I stopped moaning about the WCAG when I met the lovely Sian because how could anyone not like Sian. When she said to me there’s only four people on the team and I’m like, I will never moan about WCAG again because that’s so bad. But we’ve got to keep ourselves snappy, otherwise we’re only going to get a certain group of people who listen to us.
Julie
Well you should be greatly encouraged by this new British standard that will be produced.
Kath
Yeah, quickly.
Julie
A year from now. It will be, there’s no way it won’t be. The great competition is will it be out before WCAG 2.0.
Kath
Oooh.
Julie
I actually sweated it when we were doing PAS 78 two years ago, will it be out before WCAG 2.0. How little I had to worry about, I had absolutely no idea.
Thank you very much for that Kath.
Panayiotis to move on to you, save the best for last. I know you have expertise across so many things. I particularly wanted to talk to you about older people. Somebody mentioned earlier on in a presentation about older people being 60 plus and I take issue with that because for starters that’s only what 20 years older than I am, plus a lot of people who are that age now have used technology in work and are already familiar with using the technology and will just want to keep on using it. And it’s about continuing to support those people.
And we’re also in interesting times. The social environment in which we are often shapes how things happen - think suffragettes and women voting. And now we’re in a stage we’re about to get many, many, many more disabled people because of the much, much bigger older population and increase in impairments. And I know you’ve done a lot of research around older people. I’m just wondering what these synergies are between disabled people and older people. Could you tell us a little bit about the research that you’ve done?
Panayiotis
Yeah, of course you cover almost everything I will have said. So it’s quite a difficult answer. But first I would like to, in my capacity as representative of City University, to say that we are very proud that this event actually took place here and we are very fortunate to have AbilityNet co-host it with our …
Julie
Well thank you on behalf of …
Panayiotis
… centre for HCI.
Julie
… thank you.
Panayiotis
Julie
Yes, please do.
Panayiotis
… because I think you covered my answer. The first question was whether we have actually moved from where we were a few years before. As you are aware the City University has done the Disability Rights Commission study, on which I was a PA with Helen Petrie, that most probably most of you are familiar with. Of course Julie and others have extended that work further, but Kath raised a very important issue. How do we keep up with guidelines? And we all have highlighted the fact that guidelines are not the best way of actually evaluating interfaces and Kath pointed that out with a nice link to usability testing.
I advocate that, guidelines and usability testing, accessibility testing, are still not enough. There is still a lot more we could do to evaluate interfaces. And now I’m going to return to the question. So how can we evaluate interfaces that are targeting older people that have a social element in them like Web 2 social networking, online communities. We have done a lot of work here looking at content analysis, how do we analyse content to understand what actually takes place in those communities? It’s one thing to make it possible for somebody who is old or disabled to access that information; it’s another thing to make good use of it.
Making it possible for people to get there is one step. There are fifty other steps before we actually produce something that is valuable for these people. We often forget that and we skip it.
So what can we do for older people? What design issues should we incorporate in our framework of methodologies? We have as Julie mentioned, we have been looking at different disabilities. We have been looking at dyslexia and we have run eye tracking studies to look how dyslexics scan tag clouds or other web 2 technologies.
We have seen a huge overlap between eye scan paths of dyslexics and older people. When it comes to understanding of terminology, comprehension, navigation issues, finding their way around. I’ve also done a lot of studies with people with dementia and memory loss. We have seen a big overlap there too, between older people’s abilities and people with dementia, especially memory loss. We have done a lot with children and creativity issues. How do we engage young and old people in design activities creatively? We have seen that there is quite a lot of overlap between the way older people think and very young people think.
Can we learn from all this? Of course we can. Have we moved away from the standard methodologies to something that is more innovative, new? Maybe we need to work more on that and probably soon we will. We will move to something that is actually useful, than evaluating interfaces and feeling comfortable with something that’s accessible but still maybe not usable. That’s it.
Julie
Thanks, yeah, thank you for that. And I’m also very encouraged because there’s a group of which I am a member, and we often get overlooked, is people who have conditions that result in cognitive impairments. You mentioned Alzheimer’s, that’s what reminded me of it. People who have difficulty, people who get tired, people who have difficulty with short term memory and while we’ve done perhaps to this data, a disservice to people with learning disabilities and there’s possibly some overlap, for people with cognitive disabilities, do you have any experience in that as well when you’re thinking about older people?
Panayiotis
I will add one more population that we forgot which is international people and I think I represent that population on the panel. So internationalisation of interface is also in my view an inclusive issue. But going to the cognitive disabilities, I think although we haven’t done a lot of work looking at cognitive disabilities in isolation here at City, we have looked at people of age with dementia and Alzheimer’s as you mention. So I think there is quite a lot of overlap there.
Some issues that we have identified, and we have been running a long study with older people or with eye tracking the last two years and we have collected something like data for 50 users scanning across different abilities and disabilities as it relates to age. We have identified navigation as the key problem for these individuals, because finding their way around is a combination of things. If you have somebody with Alzheimer’s and you bring them in front of five choices and you ask them to choose the appropriate one, given a task in the usability test, that is not just reading the text and understanding, it is disorientation, remembering the first link when they reach the fifth one, finding their way when they need to scan back, developing strategies on how to scan these navigational structures.
I think these issues are quite interesting. And I think another issue that is worth considering in future conferences like this is to see how academia could help in these specific areas because I understand industry will not invest the money and therefore to develop models or theories or an understanding of these very controlled type of experiments, whereas we will be very happy to do it because that’s the type of work we do.
Julie
Great, thank you. And something I would say from those of us who’ve worked on the standards and have been trying to improve this stuff, it’s so wonderful Antonia that you’re here because I used to work in the voluntary sector and I worked at RNIB so they were able to pay somebody like me to look in to this stuff and we lack anybody from the cognitive impairment voluntary sector or group of disabled people to stand up and tell us. I’ve been absolutely lapping up everything that you were saying, which is really great, and I hope we’ll hear a lot more from you in the future.
At risk of making myself deeply unpopular with a certain member of the panel - so I’ll now turn my back - somebody who is another accessibility champion in Canada is Joe Clark. And he said something that I think is very, very valuable recently as a podcast we were both on. And he said we live in a post guideline era, and what I’m hearing from everybody on the panel is that involving disabled people, moving beyond accessibility, usability, to user experience and involvement of disabled people, feels like the right way to go.
I’m now desperately keen to get your involvement, so I hope we’ve given you lots of food for thought. Please raise your hands if you’d like to speak. We’ll start off with someone at the back there. I’ve got you two here and here. Please speak and say who you are and where you’re from and your question to the panel please.
Tom
Hi, it’s Tom Styles from Nottinghamshire County Council. I’m a developer and try to be a conscientious developer whenever I can. I’d like to make a point and maybe get some reaction. The biggest single obstacle I have in making our site accessible to screen readers is the lack of availability of screen readers to test. We are 15 developers looking for the web, to buy the Jaws licences for all those is not something that our web development team can stretch to. Are there any open source or development alternatives we can use so we can test our websites properly?
Julie
Kath, do you want to take that first?
Kath
Yeah, sure. What I’d say is nice one conscientious developer. That’s what we want. There are open software tools on the market and I’m sure that someone else will tell you about them. But the thing is they’ll only give you about 20% of the picture and unless you can use the screen reader with the monitor switched off, and get yourself out of trouble without switching the monitor back on, you are really not going to get anything that you can test safely by. And even though it’s worth looking at certain things like - I’ve got Bim sat next to me so just interrupt at any point, Bim - but you can look at things like whether your link text is good, whether your alternative text is good, whether your headers are good and look at your content before the screen reader goes anywhere near it. But what I wouldn’t do is start to think that by running a screen reader over a website, like you’re looking at it through another browser, is testing it because it’s only, you’re only testing 5%, not the user experience.
Tom
When we have done user testing with screen readers we have turned the monitor off and put headphones on and done it like that. So, we try to do things properly. We’re doing a lot of stuff with AJAX and some web 2.0 technologies using a lot more JavaScript and the standards aren’t anything… They don’t really cover that very well.
So practical experience is the only real way we’ve got. Without having a screen reader there to give us some reaction whether it works or not, we’re kind of stuck. It would be interesting if we could get Jaws to give away their screen reader like Firefox give it away and IE gets given away, so we test in all those browsers. If we could test in Jaws that would be part of our test suite just the same as IE and Firefox. Is that feasible?
Jonathan
Yeah, can I just come in for a sec? So Thunder - free, totally free, it’s a free open source, is it open source?
Kath
Yeah.
Jonathan
Well certainly it’s a free screen reader, you can go to screenreader.net and download it. But. and there is a but, it’s a big but, yeah, when it comes to JavaScript and everything like that, it’s not brilliant. In fact it doesn’t touch it at all.
So the other thing is - this is going to help you and not help you - the BBC is going to publish how we do it. So we have some screen reader support stuff which is coming out, they say it’ll be free on our website so people can see the type of things, the screen readers that we use. So maybe that will help. If you can get the money, at least we can tell you what we use to test against, because it does come down to … we use about four and there are certain particular versions that we use. In terms of whether or not you could get Freedom Scientific to get … cheaper versions of Jaws out there, that’s a question for them and I’m …
Julie
Small market.
Jonathan
It’s a small market and my understanding of that particular company is that they’re just not mighty. You’re going to have to stump up the money I think - or get somebody who can do it all for you and …
Bim
Employ a blind person.
Jonathan
Yeah.
Bim
What one of … what I was going to say is although Jaws is expensive - for those of you who aren’t aware to buy Jaws fresh out of the packet is about £700 - which is one of the huge problems that we have. Once you’ve got into being screen reader dependent then it’s quite an expensive loop. It’s almost like having an extra computer to pay for all the time. But they do provide a download, they provide two different downloads. One’s a 30-day evaluation, avoid that. The other one is a 40 minute and it will work in perpetuity, forever, but for 40 minutes, then you have to reboot the computer.
Now if you can build up your skills on a 30-day evaluation one-on-one machine, then put the 40 minute evaluation one on another machine, you should be able to do the kind of test that you want, because it sounds like you’re doing progressive testing. So you may well be able to do it within that space of time. Although with 15 people? Yeah.
Julie
Mike, you wanted to come in before we move on.
Mike
Yeah, being part of two really big websites the rule I’ve always adopted is web developers do not use screen readers. And it is a really difficult road to travel once you try testing the screen readers, because you are going to get distracted by something which you think is a problem but really isn’t.
Julie
Absolutely.
Mike
So what I always urge my developers to do, the developers that work with me, is think through, understand what the barriers are, understand how people with disabilities use the technology they’ve got. How people with disabilities use the browsers they have, what sort of configuration settings they use. Understanding how people use the web. Take that and then very, very easily you can translate that in to what sort of barriers will these people hit. Once you understand what those barriers are, then you can understand well how do I get around these barriers, how do I alleviate those barriers.
So you need to think through the problem rather than relying on screen reader testing alone. But at the end of the day nothing’s going to tell you if a website is accessible than to get people with disabilities testing your website, there is no way out of that.
Julie
Thank you, thank you Mike.
Kath
Sorry could I …
Julie
Yes, go ahead.
Kath
… you’re absolutely right. Sorry, I didn’t want to steal … let’s do the clapping for that again, but what I could do is actually there was a perfect example of that from the Legal and General when we do the user testing. And what it was is that the use of sIFR, the flash image replacement headers, that are being used like with the best of intentions in the web community so that we can have beautiful typography and accessibility.
So let’s take the case scenario that the the developer who does the right thing puts her page together with sIFR which is what the L&G were doing. The sighted developer switches the screen off, tests it with a screen reader and hears Macromedia Flash Movie - pensions, Macromedia Flash Movie - get one free, etc. So they think tick, this page is accessible because my sIFR is perfect and in a way it is. But you get it in to the lab and Julie will back me up here because we were sitting together doing this, is that you get in and you’re working with a user with a screen reader and they hear flash image replacement and they zip past it because screen reader users have been so burnt by flash that people think everything is inaccessible, and it’s going to take a long time to heal that and start encouraging people to use it. So what L&G had to do was go back and change the pages and take the sIFR out and replace it with standard HTML.
Julie
I’d like to get more questions in and what we’ll do is Mike and the ladies will take a third each. This is my third and that’ll be your third and that’ll be your third. So I’ve got one here to come next. I just also wanted to add as well eye tracking is something we do a lot in our agency, do eye tracking to see that your users never do what you expect them to do and think about disabled people in the same way. If you don’t have the impairment you won’t have a clue. Even if you do, other people are different to you, so involving users is extremely important.
I’ll take a question from here.
Josh
Thanks very much. Josh O’Connor from the National Council for the Blind in Ireland, The Centre for Inclusive Technology. It’s been a very good day, thanks very much. A lot of really interesting stuff been talked about. Just to that chap back there, don’t download the screen reader and try and figure out how to use it because the results you’ll get will be completely skewed. You won’t be using it as a native user and you’ll just confuse yourself and everybody else. But try it, but just heads up anyway.
Accessibility I think is largely a quality issue. It’s a result of good practice, good design and it’s a natural by-product of both of those things. Things have improved for people with disabilities I think. I just want to make a couple of points if that’s okay. They’ve improved for people with disability, but the web has changed very, very rapidly and that’s part of the problem. Some things, particularly like we’re talking web 2.0 and it seems to be like new for new sake sometimes, even though you can still create semantically excellent structural content, fantastic applications using languages which are 10 years old and like that.
I think and a really important part of the process now isn’t really necessarily about accessibility but it’s about user testing, involving users in usability studies and that kind of thing. Primarily because there’s a lot of lip service paid I think to involving users in development processes, but how exactly is that done on a day to day basis? How is that going to fly?
And I think one important function that user testing also serves is literally to have the social interaction with people with disabilities, which a lot of developers would never ever have. So just to have those interactions, whether they’re screen reader users, users with cognitive impairments, people using Switch AXIS, etc like that, can be real eye opener and developers have little epiphanies often when they experience user testing.
Julie
Thank you very much for that. Can we go straight over to the question on that side please?
Paul
Hi, I’m Paul Smith, BBC Manchester. I’m a client side developer and I’m like the chap over there, I’ve got good intentions and I want to do these things. I think it was Bim before mentioned about square wheels and how there is techniques on the web that people have somehow … or they’ve become common knowledge, or like a heuristic or a pattern that people will use like fahrner image replacement is one for swapping out the image for text, but then a couple of months later it was debunked because they were using the display none attribute.
And one of the things that again as the chap there was saying, if I was to try and use a screen reader, it’s such a steep learning curve and no way I’m going to be an expert or get the same user experience as a blind person or somebody who’s using a screen reader proficiently. So I was wondering if there’s somewhere with a big run down of these techniques and whether they … how they actually play out so the skip links thing before …
Julie
Mike you’re giving it a lot of body language …
Mike
Yeah.
Julie
… would you like to take that first?
Paul
Sorry, just the one from Mike’s, sorry, was it Mike’s or Steve’s presentation about the … I think sometimes when developers take it upon themselves to go all right that’ll work so I think it was the, sorry, I’ve lost it now, with the date and it was used the …
Mike
Microformats.
Paul
…Microformat and that … that’s quite an original thing for someone to do because they think well that’s a shortened version of the date. But I wasn’t aware that the title was then read aloud by the screen reader. So I’d like somewhere with …
[Inaudible]
Paul
Oh, I see right. Well I mean that’s something …
Mike
And why wouldn’t you have the screen reader doing that?
Paul
… I don’t know and I was just wondering if there was some kind of run down …
Audience
It depends on what screen reader you use.
Paul
Yeah.
Mike
Yeah.
Audience
And also the screen magnifier [inaudible].
Paul
Yeah. Well I mean this is the sort of thing that ,I as a client-side developer, find hard to come across and I read the same sites that probably most people do, but a lot of those techniques I don’t know if they’ve been tested in a lab with users. I think Joe Clark might be trying to do something like that, or was the last I’m aware.
But as I use some of these techniques, and sometimes what I’m finding that the exper … like I say, I … it’s me doing a square wheel rather than not really knowing how it’s playing out and I’d just like to know if there was a resource out there.
Julie
Mike, could you come back on …some of those?
Mike
Yeah.
Julie
Sorry to interrupt, we’re so pushed for time. Mike.
Mike
The sites I absolutely rely on for information about how screen readers work is first of all the Paciello Group blog written by Steve Faulkner and Jez Lemon. There is just so much well done research in there and they come out with some really, really interesting solutions. Like I think it’s only because of their work we can actually talk about accessible AJAX applications without falling over laughing.
Julie
Yeah.
Mike
It’s their hard work that’s produced what you see today. The second one would be … I’m going to set myself here …
Julie
Go ahead, go ahead.
Mike
… I started a blog very recently called www.accessibilitytips.com which is basically I want real practical advice on how to make things accessible beyond what you see in the guidelines. I think the statement that guidelines are limited are actually limiting us too much now. We need to go beyond the guidelines and actually think through the problems we’re trying to solve. But at the end of the day there’s some really, really good accessibility bloggers and quite a few in the audience today. There’s …
Julie
Can you reel off some names, yeah?
Mike
Yeah. There’s Ann McMeekin at pixeldiva.co.uk. I hope she’s going to start blogging more about accessibility. There’s dotjay.co.uk who has got an extremely, extremely well done lab area on his website which talks through how screen readers handle abbreviations for example. And it’s … it was there months before anybody ... picked up Microformats and accessibility issues there.
So there are some really, really good resources out there. It’s just find the right ones and at least read them, but the most important thing is think about it. Don’t just follow advice because it’s there on a website. The HTML guidelines will tell you what you can use the elements for. The Microformats community have taken that advice and used it to create … to push out their ideas and their formats without really thinking through the implications of it, like links with no link text. How does that work?
It just can not work just by even thinking about it - what good is a link without text? So you‘ve got to think through these problems and then try and back it up with some research and then some user testing. But user testing is going to be the key thing. If it doesn’t work in user testing it’s not accessible, no matter how the theory goes.
Julie
Yeah, thanks for that. Ian who was a previous speaker, did you want to chip in on that Ian?
Ian
I am not the biggest fan of Microformats but one of the slides that I did get to was where Jeremy could take a V card off a website and put it on to his phone straight away. Now although the Microformat may be not necessarily accessible, the action of being able to take information and put it on to a phone so you can actually use it in your phone book without having to copy the details down, I think that allows for so much more than just slated the format.
Mike
I don’t know. You could do the exact same solution just using a V card, a proper H card.
Julie
Very, very quickly.
Audience
Okay first problem, we’re not talking about Microformats, we’re talking about the abbreviation pattern. One very small part of one Microformat, the H calendar, you’re talking about H card, you’re talking about V card. No connection whatsoever to how to encode a date time pattern. Then you’re giving the advice that people think which is very good, people should think and should test how the stuff works instead of as you say just reading these techniques and taking them as given. People have been doing testing. Robin was brought in by the BBC to do some testing because they were concerned about the abbreviation pattern, and his expert opinion was that this is not something to be worried about in reality when screen readers by default will not expand the title of abbreviations.
Now I could go on, but I’d rather not derail this discussion. But we’re not talking about Microformats or the accessibility of Microformat, you’re talking about one pattern.
Julie
Thank you, thanks very much for that.
Mike
With the abbreviation pattern, a person with a screen reader who wants to know what an abbreviation means would more than likely have it in an expanded form, but to say that the default handling is not to read it out is therefore good enough, it still leaves the accessibility barrier there.
Audience
I think it is human reader as well as machine readable, but it is not for a fact necessarily your native language, but it’s more international than reading 2012/11/2008 or 11/12 it’s more international language than 2008/12. So to say that basically that it’s machine readable data right after that is drawing a line that I don’t think is necessarily that clear.
Julie
We’re almost out of time, time’s winged chariot and all that. Just before we take the last point, AbilityNet had asked me, there’s a gentleman from Firefox in the audience that we just wanted to give the opportunity can you raise …
Kath
He’s there. It’s Steve at the front, just behind Robin.
Julie
Ah … and you were the one with the last point.
Steve
Thanks, yes I’m Steve Lee. I’m an open source accessibility evangelist I suppose and developer and also a member of the Mozilla Accessibility Community. I just wanted to just … I guess a lot of you are probably aware of Firefox, but not be fully aware of how dedicated they are and committed to accessibility because it’s not always that clear.
So I just wanted to make sure you knew about that and in answer to your question about open source screen readers, there’s a couple. There’s NVDA and the Mozilla Accessibility QA guy, Marco, has actually said to me the other day that he can now use a computer without Jaws. He can use NVDA, and that is truly open source. That’s on Windows. On Linux you can use Orca as well. Both of the communities there would be very heavy users and they would welcome to talk to you and give you some tips about what key things perhaps you can look at without getting too confused.
The other thing is that you were talking about using ARIA and AJAX. If you use Firefox on either of those platforms and with those screen readers you be able to hook in to that. But that works, you can try ARIA for free now by using those tools, and Google Reader is an application with ARIA mark up on it. You can use that as test one. If you want to applications, widgets, then use Dojo, that’s got ARIA support on it now. JQuery is staring to add it as well, so that’s coming, and a few of the other tool kits are starting to add it in.
Just to give you a very quick brief rundown of Mozilla. Mozilla themselves, the Mozilla Foundation are non-profit and they are funding accessibility for a grant programme - things like NVDA, they paid for a programmer for a year on that. They’re also defenders of the open web, if you like. That’s their mission behind Firefox. They want the web to remain open and accessibility’s a big, big part of that. So then there’s dedication from the top downwards. There’s an accessibility team. There’s two core people. There’s Marco, who’s the QA guy, and there’s Aaron Leventhal, who’s actually been pushing accessibility in Firefox … or Mozilla for a long time. He was a lone voice for a while, but now there’s a community of some 20 people at least involved. What else? I’ve said ARIA.
Well that’s probably pretty much the basics of it. It’s free software, so you can try it. You also … it’s in a core, sorry. So things like Joost which was mentioned is using the accessibility that the Firefox team have put in to the core, ‘cause it’s built on top of that. So it’s not just usable in the web.
And perhaps the final point to make is we’re a community, please join in, come along, you can talk to us on the email, you can talk to us on IRC. Go to the websites. There’s also a user focus website called accessfirefox.org which is run by a guy who’s legally blind. He actually designed the Firefox logo and that’s great. If you’re interested in the user side of it, all the accessibility features that Firefox has, go and have a look there and see what you can find.
Thanks very much.
Julie
Thank you so much. We’re out of time now and just the final thought I guess to leave you all with is just keep getting involved. I know so many of us - look what time it is on Friday and we’re all still here.
Kath
Yeah.
Julie
So keep getting involved, keep doing what you’re doing and I’m sure it’ll be great for AbilityNet to keep on facilitating this kind of debate in the future.
What are you pointing at?
Kath
Call Robin.
Robin
Thank you very, very much.
Julie
Oh and I was just going to say thank you to everybody on the panel.
[Applause]
Robin
Thank you Julie. Yes, a big thanks to everybody on the panel, all the speakers for today and Julie for hosting the panel. And so yes, let’s start with the formal thanks and we’ll start with the speakers and I think that the girls have got a little something for each speaker. We’ll try and do this as quickly as possible.
That looks interesting.
Robin
So a huge, huge thank you to the speakers. They’ve all given freely of their time today for a really worthy cause.
Thank you also to our sponsors. Have we got a list of …oh sorry, thanks. I think I’ll carry on. So sponsors, have we got a list of the sponsors, Gwen do you want to quickly read those out.
Gwen
Adobe, BT, we’ve had donations from … gosh I’m trying to think of them all now … sorry. Yeah, I’ve said BT, I’ve said Adobe.
Robin
O’Reilly.
Gwen
O’Reilly Books.
Robin
BBC.
Gwen
BBC and there’s one more.
A5
Channel 4.
Gwen
Channel 4.
Robin
Yeah.
Gwen
Sorry.
Robin
Fantastic.
Gwen
My brain went.
Robin
Thank you, thank you very much. So yes and thank you very much indeed to City University for supporting us today. We’re really, really appreciative of this new synergy that we’ve got now that we’re based here. We use their lab facilities to great effect and I have to say with user testing, and there’s a real synergy between us and the HCI department that I’m sure is going to flourish in the weeks and months and years to come.
Thank you everybody for coming, probably a long way some of you. I know that we’ve got a delegation from Stockholm who have come all the way. So I think that deserves a round of applause.
So thank you to everyone for coming and thank you to the team - the AbilityNet angels for doing so well and zooming around the place and for helping out in general. And I’m trying to think desperately if there’s anyone before I go to the very most important person.
Ah yes, okay. Diana and Gwen who have been the absolute backbone of the event organisation over the last few months. Thank you very much indeed to them. Round of applause. We couldn’t have done it without you.
And last but by no means least, Kath who only just got through this without bursting a gasket because it’s been such a roller coaster ride in getting this thing together. And Kath, where are you?
Kath
I’m here Robin.
Robin
We’ve got a little something for Kath as well. Diana do you want to do the honours there. I haven’t got it, where is it? Diana, oh sorry. Oh great, so thank you very much, a huge round of applause for Kath.
Audience
[Applause]
Robin
If I’ve forgotten anyone I am really, really sorry. Thank you again.
Kath
I don’t want to make this like the Oscars because I know if you’re not in it, it’s a bit bloody boring isn’t it. But this all started off at @Media in the bar. Mr Christian Heilmann back there and Jeremy Keith. I grabbed them and said, “Please would you, if we organised a conference about Web 2.0, will you come and talk?” And he said, “Yeah.” “Will you do it for nothing?” “Yeah.” So that was fantastic.
And then I met this fella here, and Ian got the worst of it because I found out he was from BBC Backstage, so I started off number one, “Ian would you like to be in a video?” “Yeah okay.” “Ian, I’m organising a conference on web 2.0, would you like to come and speak at it?” “Yeah.!“ Do you think you could sponsor it as well?” And like can we have a car please.
So whatever you do at the drinks in the bar be very careful when I ask you for something, [laughs] ]‘cause you can take the girl out of Liverpool but you can’t take Liverpool out of the girl. Thanks everyone, thanks to everyone who’s made this happen. It’s a team effort. To everyone on the AbilityNet team as well and I’ll shut up, ‘cause that is an Oscar speech. Thank you, boss.
Robin
Thank you very much indeed, thanks Kath.
[applause]
[Ends]
© AbilityNet 2008